The script is spectacularly fine, but it wouldn't be nearly as effective without Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. This makes sense because Marber wrote the script with them in mind, and I say this without being a fan of either actress. Never has a less versatile or more ungiving movie actress than Dench been used as indiscriminately, though it's clear why directors and up-market audiences like her: she marshals and deploys her immense technical resources with military precision. So did the great Edith Evans, but unlike Dench, Evans enjoyed the fancy-dress, the occasion for grand gesture that playacting provided, the mannered dialogue that seemed to call for her archly reverberant delivery (that voice could quaver like a towering fruit-filled Jell-o mold). Dench conveys a sense of gravity, of somewhat humorless duty. She has become the personification of English theatrical skill at a time of morbid self-doubt, Britannia as a corroded but still razor-sharp battleaxe. She may be a great actress, but one who plays both Lady Bracknell and Lady Catherine de Bourg without getting laughs is not my kind of great actress.
All of which makes her perfect for Barbara, and the sophistication and adamantine intelligence that usually keep Dench from melting into her characters is just right for Barbara, helplessly frozen inside herself. It's brilliant casting: that magnificent age-cracked picklepuss emphasizes the precision of the writing because we can see Barbara blasting possibilities with her glance and then retreating even further from what she experiences as a world without possibilities.
Neither has Dench's delivery ever been so pointed — the humorlessness is brilliantly comic here. The imperious way this schoolmarm, this crone uses the term "Madam," for instance, is unforgettable, truly threatening and yet very, very funny. It's a vestige of the most Dostoevskian bits in the book, such as Barbara's disquisition on the ways in which lonely people are such terrible snobs about each other, "afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness". Heller, Marber, and now Dench are all capable of insights that make you shudder and laugh at the same time.
And Dench by nature makes Barbara's emotionality believable without asking the audience for sympathy. There's always something welcome about Dench's refusal of easy connections with the audience, and here it moves her toward a bigger prize. Hollywood's legion of terminal starlets, desperate to be liked (and to be found as attractive as their granddaughters), are put to shame en masse by the fearlessness of Dench, who was over 70 when this movie was shot. In her hands, Barbara's story suggests how teensy a tragedy you can make of your emotional life. There are only a scattering of Shakespearean roles for women in this range, so Dench has essentially invented one. Though her story is outside the precincts of tragedy in a formal sense, Barbara acts with a tragic hero's combination of vigor and blindness. And Dench is so vivid that she turns this parched, underpaid professional into a confiding, self-defeating monster — Richard III in squalid middle-class miniature.
Article comments
1 - Michael J. West
Nice review. I never saw this one; my wife went with a girl friend to see it and loved it, but also found it quite disturbing. (On that note, nice Siouxsie Sioux reference, too. :-D)
Doesn't it almost seem redundant at this point to say that Judi Dench turned in a masterful performance?
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment, Michael. Disturbing to identify with such a character, but also disturbing that loving Siouxsie Sioux is now a sign of middle-age! Mais où sont les fucking neiges d'antan?
As I tried to say in shorter compass in the review, Judi Dench’s performances may generally be masterful on a technical level but are not necessarily appropriate for the material she’s given. She has a distinctively commanding air onscreen but her personality is less notable for what it gives than for what it withholds. This makes her technical skill more apparent"what else is there to pay attention to?"but not very involving. She lacks the playfulness of many English theatrical crossovers, e.g., Edith Evans, Leslie Howard, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Wendy Hiller, Vivien Leigh, Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, a quality that makes me happy to watch them in anything. As a result, although directors will cast Dench in anything “classy,” her actual range is quite limited. Barbara in Notes on a Scandal is smack in the middle of that range so all the skill and even the reserve resonate for once, and in fact are highly amusing.
3 - Michael J. West
I suppose that's true. Dench's best work has always called for theatricality, technically precision, and humorlessness--she's easily the greatest Lady MacBeth I've ever seen--but I'm not sure it's an accident that she sometimes spins comedy out of that dourness. Witness her brief turn as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.
4 - Alan Dale
Shakespeare in Love would be an exception to my comments about her, but it may be an exception that proves the rule. How could she NOT get laughs in those two great roles in The Importance of Being Earnest and Pride & Prejudice? You'd have to work at it. Perhaps the humorlessness was ideologically motivated, but that doesn't make it more palatable.
5 - Michael J. West
Ideologically motivated? How do you mean?
6 - Alan Dale
British literary, theater, and film folk are generally pretty left-wing. I got the sense from the way Dench was presented as Lady Catherine in Pride & Prejudice--her delivery, the make-up, the lighting--that the intention was to show how truly horrid upper-class pride could be. That's part of Austen's intention, too, to make D'Arcy's pride seem less repellent by contrast. But Lady Catherine's pomposity in the book is laugh-out-loud funny, and it's a huge loss to emphasize an ideological point that's inherent in the character at the expense of the wit that is equally important.